Affairs: Is Your Relationship At Risk?

Before you can decide what to do with the affair in your life, it may be helpful to know what it means. Brown (1999) identifies five different types of affairs:

Conflict Avoiders are nice people who are terrified to be anything but nice, for fear that conflict will lead to abandonment or losing control. They don't have a way to stand up to each other when there's a problem, so they can't resolve their difference and the marriage erodes.

Intimacy Avoiders are frightened of getting too close, so they keep the barriers high between them. Conflict is one barrier, affairs are another. Their emotional connection with each other is through frequent and intense conflict. Often, each spouse becomes involved in an affair. These couples are the mirror opposite of the Conflict Avoiders.

Sexual Addicts use sex over and over again to numb inner pain and emptiness, much like alcoholics use alcohol. Among married people, men are sexual addicts more often than women.

The Split Selves have tried to do marriage right. Both spouses have sacrificed their own feelings and needs to take care of others, and the deprivation has caught up with one of them. The affair is serious, long-term and passionate. The spouse who is having the affair focuses on deciding between the marriage and the affair partner and avoids looking at the inner split. Most often this is a man's affair, but that may be changing.

Exiters are Conflict Avoiders at heart, but they take it further. One spouse has already decided to leave the marriage and the affair provides the justification. Quite often one partner has emotionally divorced over a long period of time even though the couple are still living together. The other partner usually blames the affair rather than looking at how their marriage got to this point and the role they played. This is sometimes referred to as an "equal opportunity" affair.